Latinus

Virgil opens the second half of the Aeneid with Latinus. He is an old king who has long ruled fields and towns in peace. Virgil says he was the son of Faunus and the Laurentine nymph Marica. Faunus was the son of Picus, and Picus traced his line to Saturn. Latinus had no living son, since his only boy was taken in early youth. A single daughter, Lavinia, now of an age to marry, kept his house.

Many suitors sought Lavinia, and the handsomest was Turnus, whom the queen pressed to make her son-in-law. The gods sent warnings against the match. Virgil says a swarm of bees settled on the laurel that Latinus had dedicated to Phoebus, and a seer read it as a foreign army arriving. Then, as Lavinia stood beside her father at the altar, her hair seemed to catch fire. The sign promised her fame but foretold a great war for her people.

Troubled, Latinus went to the oracle of his father Faunus beneath Albunea. He sacrificed a hundred sheep and lay on their fleeces. A voice from the grove told him not to marry his daughter to a Latin. Foreign sons-in-law would come, it said, whose blood would carry his name to the stars. Latinus did not keep the answer to himself, and Rumour had spread it through Italy by the time the Trojan ships came into the Tiber.

In the Aeneid, Latinus received the Trojan envoys in the palace of his grandfather Picus. Virgil adds that Circe, who loved Picus, struck him with her golden wand and turned him into a bird. Latinus listened to the envoy Ilioneus in silence, thinking of the oracle. He then offered friendship and his daughter to Aeneas, whom he took to be the promised son-in-law. He sent Aeneas a chariot and a pair of horses from the line that Circe bred in secret from her father's immortal horses.

The peace did not hold. Juno sent the Fury Allecto to madden Queen Amata and Turnus, and Amata pleaded with Latinus against the Trojan match. He stood firm. When the Latins demanded war, Virgil says Latinus stood like a rock against the sea, then gave up the reins of rule and shut himself in his palace. He refused to open the Gates of War, whose threshold Janus guards, so Juno burst them open with her own hand.

In Book 12 Latinus rides out in a four-horse chariot for the single combat of Aeneas and Turnus. His brow is ringed with twelve golden rays, which Virgil calls a sign of the Sun, his grandfather. Aeneas promises that Latinus will keep his arms and his power as father-in-law. Latinus swears the treaty with his hand raised to heaven. When the Rutulians break the truce, Latinus flees, carrying his gods away from the broken oath.

Livy gives two versions of Latinus's first meeting with the Trojans. In one, he led the Aborigines out against the newcomers, was defeated in battle, and then made peace and a marriage alliance. In the other, he stepped out before the lines and asked who the strangers were. Hearing that they were Trojans led by Aeneas, he gave his right hand in friendship, made a treaty, and gave Aeneas his daughter.

Dionysius of Halicarnassus tells a third version. Latinus was already at war with the Rutulians when raiders began stripping his coast. He marched against them, but a divinity of the place came to him in a dream and told him to receive the Greeks. Aeneas had a matching dream from his own household gods. The two kings met, made a treaty, exchanged children as hostages and fought the Rutulians together. Latinus then gave Aeneas his daughter Lavinia.

Greek writers gave Latinus a Greek father. Hesiod's Theogony says Circe bore Odysseus two sons, Agrius and Latinus, who ruled the Tyrsenians far off in the holy islands. Apollodorus makes Latinus a son of Odysseus by Calypso instead. Hyginus moves him a generation down. After Odysseus died, Telemachus married Circe, and their son Latinus gave his name to the Latin language.

Dionysius reports yet another father. Some said Heracles had a son by a Hyperborean girl he had brought as a hostage. Before leaving for Argos he married her to Faunus, king of the Aborigines, and so Latinus was generally thought to be the son of Faunus rather than of Heracles. Dionysius repeats the claim when he dates Aeneas's landing, saying Latinus passed for Faunus's son but was really the son of Heracles.

Livy says the victorious Aborigines and Trojans lost their leader Latinus in the war with Turnus. Aeneas then gave both peoples the one name of Latins. Dionysius puts Latinus's death in the fourth year after Aeneas left Troy. The Rutulians had rebelled under Tyrrhenus, a nephew of Queen Amata, angry that Latinus had given Lavinia to an outsider. Latinus and Tyrrhenus both fell, Aeneas won, and he succeeded to his father-in-law's kingdom.